>One of the biggest problems that I have in the EU is that it's almost federated
I would argue it's even worse, because with properly designed federated system you get checks and balances to some extent.
There are parts of EU that have almost zero oversight.
Can you elaborate more? When you say "checks and balances" do you mean explicit legal mechanisms or implicit mechanisms like Tiebout-style foot voting? For the latter areas with "almost zero oversight" seem advantages. Also, can you give an example of these low-oversight places and how it manifests? I'm thankful even for some pointers in what to search for.
One example is the effective prohibition on spraying pesticides by air, including drone. Drones allow lower pesticide use than current, legal practices
Oh, so "parts of the EU" wasn't about geographic areas but policy areas? But this sounds like more regulation, not checks and balances either. Are you replying to the right comment?
Yeah, this in between state is really frustrating. I hope we will see a push towards more federalization, but that’s unlikely
It’s unlikely because smaller member states wouldn’t want that as they’d be outvoted by bigger members and thus forced to implement laws that might not even make sense in those (smaller) countries.
It’s unlikely for a lot of reasons, but that’s not one of them given we don’t know what a federalized EU would look like.
We had a federation around here called Yugoslavia and we saw how it played out. Forcing different nations to agree on everything down to things that are basically cultural preferences never worked well. Regulations, bureaucracy and laws are often based on cultural preferences. The EU tries to find a common baseline but still leaves a lot to each member state to avoid this problem.
That's why federations have a Senate where all states get equal representation.
Then the bigger member states will say that they’re contributing so much more but get very little voting power etc. It’s not an easy problem to solve, hence the current indirect system.